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"Church Membership"
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Black Indians and Freedmen
Often seen as ethnically monolithic, the African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) Church in fact successfully pursued evangelism
among diverse communities of indigenous peoples and Black Indians.
Christina Dickerson-Cousin tells the little-known story of the AME
Church's work in Indian Territory, where African Methodists engaged
with people from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Creeks,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) and Black Indians from various
ethnic backgrounds. These converts proved receptive to the
historically Black church due to its traditions of self-government
and resistance to white hegemony, and its strong support of their
interests. The ministers, guided by the vision of a racially and
ethnically inclusive Methodist institution, believed their
denomination the best option for the marginalized people.
Dickerson-Cousin also argues that the religious opportunities
opened up by the AME Church throughout the West provided another
impetus for Black migration.
Insightful and richly detailed, Black Indians and
Freedmen illuminates how faith and empathy encouraged the
unique interactions between two peoples.
eBook
Social Distance in the United States: Sex, Race, Religion, Age, and Education Homophily among Confidants, 1985 to 2004
Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily—the actual level of contact between people in different social categories and the level of contact relative to chance. We use data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys to ask whether the strengths of five social distinctions—sex, race/ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, and education—changed over the past two decades in core discussion networks. Changes in the actual level of homophily are driven by the demographic composition of the United States. As the nation has become more diverse, cross-category contacts in race/ethnicity and religion have increased. After describing the raw homophily rates, we develop a case-control model to assess homophily relative to chance mixing. We find decreasing rates of homophily for gender but stability for race and age, although the young are increasingly isolated from older cohorts outside of the family. We also find some weak evidence for increasing educational and religious homophily. These relational trends may be explained by changes in demographic heterogeneity, institutional segregation, economic inequality, and symbolic boundaries.
Journal Article
How Complex Religion Can Improve Our Understanding of American Politics
Sociologists have long acknowledged the importance of religion for American politics, especially for two groups of people: (
a
) (white) conservative Protestants, who are increasingly affiliated with the religious right, and (
b
) progressives, who are more and more disaffiliated from organized religion. However, a comprehensive statement of the ways in which religion matters for politics, the context in which it matters and does not matter, and how this has changed over time is lacking. Recent reviews acknowledge that at best, the relationship between religion and politics in the United States is \"not straightforward\" (
Grzymala-Busse 2012
, p. 427). We contend that this is primarily a result of the fact that neither the sociology of religion nor political sociology adequately considers the role that inequality (especially race and class but also gender) play in religious affiliation (and nonaffiliation). As a result, both fields have neglected to systematically examine the ways in which class and race may shape the relationship between religion and politics in the United States. We thus argue that both fields would benefit from engagement with theories of complex inequality that take seriously the ways in which inequalities of race, class, and gender interact (
McCall 2001
). In doing so, scholars also need to recognize that these structures of inequality are deeply intertwined with religious group membership-a theoretical argument that we call complex religion.
Journal Article
Thieves in the Temple
Though waves of cynics and atheists claim that America is too religious, G. Jeffrey MacDonald disagrees. America's churches, he argues, have abandoned their sacred role as dispensers of community values, and instead are increasingly serving up entertainment, aerobics, yoga classes, and other services that have nothing to do with religious faith. As religion becomes more consumer-oriented, congregants are able to avoid the moral, intellectual, and theological commitments Christianity requires by simply joining a different-and less rigorous-church. Grounded in journalism, personal experience, and Christian theology,Thieves in the Templeis an impassioned and provocativecri de coeurfor a new religious reformation. Incisively critiquing today's dangerous movement away from true religion, MacDonald demonstrates just how much Americans stand to lose when churches sell their souls to recruit parishioners.
eBook
Religion and Volunteering in Context: Disentangling the Contextual Effects of Religion on Voluntary Behavior
This study examines whether religion's effect on volunteering spills over to nonreligious individuals through personal ties between religious and nonreligious individuals. We use three different analytic strategies that focus on national, local, and personal network level contexts to identify the network spillover effect of religion on volunteering. We find that if nonreligious people have close friends with religious affiliations, they are more likely to volunteer for religious and nonreligious causes. However, this network spillover effect cannot be inferred from the relationship between volunteering and national or local level religious context—a common approach in the literature. In fact, we find that the average level of local religious participation is negatively associated with volunteering among the nonreligious in the United States. This novel finding suggests that to fully understand religion's civic role in the wider community, we need to consider how religion might influence the civic life of people outside religious communities, not just those within them. Our findings also suggest that in spite of methodological advances, studies that purport to test mechanisms at one level of analysis by using data at a larger level of aggregation run a high risk of committing an ecological fallacy.
Journal Article
Mormon Identities in Transition
This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the prime concern of Mormon Studies - the relationship between knowledge and spirituality - and how that relationship has been defined and reinterpreted over time. Beginning with an examination of the international prospects for Mormonism at the turn of the century, the volume’s overarching theme, from sociological, anthropological and theological approaches, is the examination of changing Mormon identities. The contributors review the expansion of Mormonism, the emotional and social contexts of its historic and contemporary manifestations, the distinction between ‘Utah’ Mormons and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and issues in Mormon feminism, concluding with a valuable review of the sources and documents available for studying Mormonism.
eBook
Religion and the Transmission of COVID-19 in The Netherlands
The aim of this study was to find out if the typical spread of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in The Netherlands, with significantly higher levels in the Dutch Bible belt and the southern, traditionally Catholic provinces, is related to the specific religious composition of the country. To do this, government statistics regarding the level of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 per municipality were combined with statistics regarding church attendance and church membership rates. Results showed that in the Dutch Bible belt the level of patients with COVID-19 was strongly related to church attendance, but in the southern, traditionally Catholic part of The Netherlands nominal church membership mattered more than church attendance. On the basis of these findings, the conclusion was drawn that religion probably facilitates the spread of the virus in both a direct and indirect way. It facilitates the spread of the virus directly through worship services but also indirectly by way of endorsing more general cultural festivities like carnival and maybe even by strengthening certain non-religious social bonds. Epidemiologists monitoring the spread of the virus are called upon to focus more on these possible indirect or latent effects of religion.
Journal Article
Risk aversion and religion
We use a dataset for a demographically representative sample of the Dutch population that contains a revealed preference risk attitude measure, as well as detailed information about participants' religious background, to study three issues. First, we find strong confirmatory evidence that more religious people, as measured by church membership or attendance, are more risk averse with regard to financial risks. Second, we obtain some evidence that Protestants are more risk averse than Catholics in such tasks. Third, our data suggest that the link between risk aversion and religion is driven by social aspects of church membership, rather than by religious beliefs themselves.
Journal Article